Polymorphous Domesticities: Pets, Bodies, and Desire in Four Modern Writers
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UC Irvine FlashPoints Title Polymorphous Domesticities: Pets, Bodies, and Desire in Four Modern Writers Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3p449809 Author Schiesari, Juliana Publication Date 2012-03-01 Peer reviewed eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Polymorphous Domesticities FlashPoints The series solicits books that consider literature beyond strictly national and disciplinary frameworks, distinguished both by their historical grounding and their theoretical and conceptual strength. We seek studies that engage theory without losing touch with history and work historically without falling into uncritical positivism. FlashPoints aims for a broad audience within the humanities and the social sciences concerned with moments of cultural emergence and transformation. In a Benjaminian mode, FlashPoints is interested in how literature contributes to forming new constellations of culture and history and in how such formations function critically and politically in the present. Available online at http://repositories.cdlib.org/ucpress. Series Editors Ali Behdad (Comparative Literature and English, UCLA) Judith Butler (Rhetoric and Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley), Founding Editor Edward Dimendberg (Film & Media Studies, UC Irvine), Coordinator Catherine Gallagher (English, UC Berkeley), Founding Editor Jody Greene (Literature, UC Santa Cruz) Susan Gillman (Literature, UC Santa Cruz) Richard Terdiman (Literature, UC Santa Cruz) 1. On Pain of Speech: Fantasies of the First Order and the Literary Rant, by Dina Al-Kassim 2. Moses and Multiculturalism, by Barbara Johnson, with a foreword by Barbara Rietveld 3. The Cosmic Time of Empire: Modern Britain and World Literature, by Adam Barrows 4. Poetry in Pieces: César Vallejo and Lyric Modernity, by Michelle Clayton 5. Disarming Words: Empire and the Seductions of Translation in Egypt, by Shaden M. Tageldin 6. Wings for Our Courage: Gender, Erudition, and Republican Thought, by Stephanie H. Jed 7. The Cultural Return, by Susan Hegeman 8. Reading Delhi: The Politics of Language and Literary Production in India, by Rashmi Sadana 9. The Cylinder: Kinematics of the Nineteenth Century, by Helmut Müller-Sievers 10. Polymorphous Domesticities: Pets, Bodies, and Desire in Four Modern Writers, by Juliana Schiesari Polymorphous Domesticities Pets, Bodies, and Desire in Four Modern Writers Juliana Schiesari University of California Press Berkeley • Los Angeles • London University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2012 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Schiesari, Juliana. Polymorphous domesticities : pets, bodies, and desire in four modern writers / Juliana Schiesari. p. cm. – (Flashpoints ; 10) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-520-27084-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Animals in literature. 2. Wharton, Edith, 1862-1937–Criticism and interpretation. 3. Barnes, Djuna–Criticism and interpretation. 4. Colette, 1873-1954–Criticism and interpretation. 5. Ackerley, J. R. (Joe Randolph), 1896-1967–Criticism and interpretation. 6. Pets in literature. 7. Human-animal relationships in literature. 8. Sex (Psychology) in literature. 9. Social structure in literature. 10. Social values in literature. I. Title. II. Title: Pets, bodies, and desire in four modern writers. PN56.A64.S25 2011 809'.93362–dc23 2011027809 Manufactured in the United States of America 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on 50-pound Enterprise, a 30% post-consumer-waste, recycled, deinked Y ber that is processed chlorine-free. It is acid-free and meets all ANSI/NISO (Z 39.48) requirements. For Angelica and all the wonderful animals This page intentionally left blank Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 1. Re-Visions of Diana in Edith Wharton 16 2. Colette at Home 38 3. Romancing the Beast: J. R. Ackerley’s Dog Days and the Meaning of Sex 76 Afterword 114 Notes 117 Bibliography 127 vii This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgments This book re_ ects my long-standing interest on the subject of nonhu- man animals as a literary project but also, and foremost, as domestic friends and companions. I am deeply indebted to many colleagues and friends for their support of my work as well as for their generosity in pointing me toward some of the authors whose literary works are the subject of this book. I owe a special thanks to Laura Mulvey, who Y rst told me about the incred- ible opus and world of J. R. Ackerley, and to Kari Lokke, who brought my attention to the extraordinary work of Colette and her menagerie. I also owe Georges Van Den Abbeele thanks for his careful attention to detail, astute readings, and editorial skills. Heartfelt gratitude goes to Brenda Schildgen, Bob Schildgen, and Julia Simon, who read parts of the manuscript as I was preparing to send it off to UC Press. Their invaluable comments, suggestions, and editorial acumen undoubtedly helped turn the manuscript into its present form. It is also a pleasure to thank all those who, in many ways, contri- buted to its publication: Barbara Spackman, Carla Freccero, Christina Schiesari, Nancy Schiesari, Clarence Walker, Tim Murray, Renate Ferro, Gail Finney, Natalie Strobach, Mike Graziano, and all my colleagues in comparative literature and in French and Italian for their support over the years for this project. I have been fortunate to enjoy and share many conversations with Carla Freccero, Barbara Spackman, Brenda ix x | Acknowledgments Schildgen, and Julia Simon on the subject of sharing life and domestic spaces with our animal companions. I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to Barbara Spackman and an anonymous reader at the Press whose comments and suggestions helped turn this manuscript into a much stronger and more coherent book. I am ever grateful to Dick Terdiman for believing in this work and for gently shepherding it as it went through its various stages toward pub- lication. I also thank Elisabeth Magnus for her careful editorial work. Finally, I wish to thank the Flashpoints committee and the University of California Press board for their support in the publication of this book. No words can adequately express the life-sustaining energy that my daughter Christina, my granddaughter Angelica, and our animal companions have meant to me. While enduring one of the worst crises in our lives. they managed to keep me focused on the manuscript and brought much and continued joy despite our common suffering. I am ever thankful and most fortunate to have them in my life. Introduction It is interesting that in the country in almost every village there is a man who has not married. Nobody can take him very seriously, they often call him familiarly, a hen, and most of the time he does go a little funny. There are of course some women not often more than one in a village who has not married, but she is not so likely in France to go funny, of course there are always animals, and animals can become a family, to a Frenchwoman, but not to a Frenchman. —Gertrude Stein, Paris, France This book continues the exploration I began in Beasts and Beau- ties: Animals, Gender and Domestication in the Italian Renaissance concerning the co-development of two different but related forms of domestication since the Renaissance: the new culture of domesticated animals that issued forth in the modern phenomenon of the “pet,” and the contemporaneous delineation of the home as a uniquely private enclosure, where the pater familias ruled over his own secluded world of domesticated wife, children, servants—and animals.1 The early modern invention of the pet, I argue, takes place squarely within the simultane- ous negotiation of modern family relations that have long de+ ned the unequal status of men, women, and the beings who live with them.2 The relations between domesticity and power that have emerged in Euro- American societies since the Renaissance have drawn on a wide set of ideological af+ nities between “femininity,” “sexuality,” and “animality” in ways that continue to frame our understanding of how different personal, social, sexual, and species identities are formed and valued today. The patriarchal norm of the modern family with homebound women, children, and pets is, like any norm, only a social convention, 1 2 | Introduction an imagined ideological ideal that may often be undermined in prac- tice. Yet departing from the norm, even ever so slightly, can bring real risks. As Stein’s quip underscores, men without a domesticated realm to rule lose—at least “in France”—not just their masculinity but their very humanity: they become “hens” and “go a little funny.” Women, speci+ cally French women, however, can create their own, alternative domestic space of animals (and, why not, of other women, children, perhaps even some men).3 Stein remains upbeat about this possibility here, but history tells otherwise. The spinster on the edge of town with a few too many cats or dogs has all too often served as the stereotype of the witch with her devilish familiars, who then becomes all too easily persecuted for living outside normative gender codes.4 There are, in short, ways to resist the patriarchal paradigm with the establishment of alternative domesticities, but with varying risks as well as positive possibilities. To the extent that norms are themselves representational constructs (socially accredited and prescribed idealizations), literature, in particular, provides an especially propitious domain for the imagi- nary exploration of different representations.